by Betsy Peters, '10

Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE), a national organization with over 900 chapters across the country and many more internationally, has a strong presence at Hillsdale College and has been extending its efforts around the globe. At the Hillsdale chapter, students work with an advisory board of local business leaders and Hillsdale grads to apply six standards in their many projects: entrepreneurship, market economics, environmental sustainability, business ethics, personal success skills, and financial literacy.

In the past years, the Hillsdale chapter has developed a unique partnership with the Lingap Children’s Foundation in the Philippines. Recently, after helping to raise $1,000 for the Lingap orphanage to buy computers for its library by selling t-shirts on campus, the SIFE students decided to teach free-market principles to the children at the orphanage by giving them a project of their own.

The project took the form of a competition with all 100 children from the orphanage, ages 4-17, divided among five teams. Hillsdale’s chapter distributed $300 of seed money among the teams with which to design and create a product to sell locally. Projects were judged for a variety of criteria such as their creativity, profitability, affordability, and quality. Each team received the technical and moral support of the staff workers, but the children were expected to do all of the work themselves. They eagerly set about their projects: cake and pastry baking, floor wax and candle production, jewelry, food processing, and rag making. The children sold their products by consignment through their summer break from April until July, working to win the awards the Hillsdale SIFE students promised the winning team.


The team projects have inspired some of the Lingap children to propose a counter challenge to the SIFE chapter back at Hillsdale. Although the jewelry team lost the competition to the cake baking team, they sent their boxes of jewelry to Hillsdale, urging the college students to compete amongst themselves to sell the jewelry in the United States.

Founder of Lingap and SIFE advisor, John Drake, ’74, noted that, besides teaching valuable market skills, the children at the orphanage learned teamwork and trust. For children who have grown up in abuse and neglect, the success of the project extends far beyond the merely monetary benefits. “Some were really exceptional with their leadership skills,” Drake praised. He also remarked how much fun the children had in the process. “Education has to be fun,” Drake noted. Judging from the pictures of the Lingap children, they certainly look like they had fun learning. Drake looks forward to watching the ways the Hillsdale SIFE students will take up this counter-challenge.